Sergey_Brin

Sergey Brin

Brin currently holds the position of President of Technology at Google and has a net worth estimated at $18.5 billion as of March 9, 2007, making him the 26th richest person in the world and the 5th richest person in the United States, together with Larry Page. He is also the fourth-youngest billionaire in the world.

Interest in search engines

Brin expressed interest in the Internet very early on in his studies at Stanford. He authored and co-authored various papers on data-mining and pattern extraction. He also wrote software to ease the process of putting scientific papers often written in TeX, a text-processing language, into HTML form, as well as a website for film ratings.

The defining moment for Brin, however, was when he met future co-president of Google, Larry Page. According to Google lore, Page and Brin "were not terribly fond of each other when they first met as Stanford University graduate students in computer science in 1995. Nevertheless, they soon found a common interest: retrieving relevant information from large data sets. Together, the pair authored what is widely considered their seminal contribution, a paper entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.

Brin's mother is diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. In 2008, he donated a large sum to the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where his mother is being treated. Brin had the opportunity to use the services of 23AndMe and found that, although Parkinson's is generally not hereditary, both he and his mother possess a mutation of the LRRK2 gene, known as G2019S, which puts the likelihood of developing Parkinson's in later years between 20-80%.

Brin and Larry Page purchased a Boeing 767 airliner for their business and personal needs. The plane's interior was supposed to be redesigned by aviation designer Leslie Jennings, but a legal battle between the designer and the holding company that owns the plane stalled the renovation. The plane would hold about 50 passengers when refurbished, and would include a California King-sized bed.

Brin and Page are the executive producers of the 2009 film Broken Arrows.

In 2007, Brin was cited by PC World as #1 on a list of the "50 most important people on the Web," along with Larry Page and Google CEOEric Schmidt.

In June 2008, it was announced that Brin had made a $5 million investment in Space Adventures, the Virginia-based space tourism company. His investment will serve as a deposit for a reservation on one of Space Adventures' proposed flights in 2011. So far, Space Adventures has sent five tourists into space.